1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a facsimile system for carrying out facsimile communication via a computer network such as Internet and a facsimile terminal and a format converter used in the facsimile system.
2. Description of the Related Art
With a facsimile terminal such as so-called Internet-based facsimile, facsimile communication is carried out through a computer network such as Internet, etc. This facsimile communication is achieved by transmitting and receiving e-mail with image data attached. The image data is attached to e-mail as a data file of a predetermined file format, such as TIFF-FX format, etc.
However, there are various other file formats used for image transmission via the computer networks, such as BMP format, PDF format, etc. Consequently, there are cases in which image data of the file format different from that which the terminal supports may be transmitted to the facsimile terminal. In the facsimile terminal, it is naturally unable to reproduce the image from the data of the file format that is not supported, and the image is unable to be outputted.
Therefore, in such event, the conventional facsimile terminal gives an error report to the user of its own terminal, terminal of the sender, or controller of the network to which its own terminal is connected. And transmitting e-mail again with the image data of the file format which the receiver side facsimile terminal supports attached in conformity to this kind of report can complete the image communication. However, carrying out e-mail transmission again in this way throws the first e-mail transmission down the drain and causes extremely big waste.
Now, this kind of facsimile terminal is assumed to be used in such a manner a plurality of terminals are connected to LAN linked up with Internet in companies. Under this kind of use form, it could be thought that the file format converting function is provided with the server located between Internet and LAN so that e-mail that arrives at each facsimile terminal is given as e-mail with the image data of the file format supported by the facsimile terminal.
However, if the server is configured in this way, the server must process all the e-mails that are sent to all the facsimile terminals, and the load becomes excessively large. Consequently, a server with extremely high processing capabilities must be used and the cost will increase tremendously.